Dissent rounds on Rumsfeld

The US Defence Secretary is emerging as the fall guy amid accusations of ignored intelligence and poor tactics. Julian Coman in Washington reports

12:00AM GMT 30 Mar 2003

On the morning of March 13, six days before the first coalition air-strikes on Baghdad, Donald Rumsfeld slipped out of his office in the Pentagon's Eisenhower Executive Office Building to attend a crucial war meeting.

When the Secretary of Defence entered the packed conference room, he was greeted by the finest collection of influential old soldiers, think-tank strategists and intelligence experts that Washington has to offer. On Mr Rumsfeld's orders, Pentagon officials had organised an impressive gathering of America's military and foreign policy elite."It was an assembly of the great and the good," said one official. "For a final review of how we were going to go after Iraq."

The State Department was represented, as was the CIA. Barry McCaffrey, a retired General who led key infantry division during the first Gulf War, was there, sitting alongside equally illustrious former colleagues.

One by one, Mr Rumsfeld, Richard Myers, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and his deputy, Peter Pace, outlined the administration's thinking on the war against Iraq.

There would be a "lightning drive" to Baghdad by a limited ground force of around 70,000 troops. Possible confrontations in Iraq's southern cities would be by-passed. The race for the capital would be combined with an emphasis on spectacular but precise bombing, generating "shock and awe". This would be designed to avoid civilian casualties, preserve Iraqi infrastructure and intimidate Saddam's military.

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A hated regime could be removed without waging war on an entire country. If Iraqi forces deserted Saddam, as anticipated, and the people rose up against the dictator, the conflict could be over in weeks or even days with little bloodshed.

Mr Rumsfeld, who originally envisioned a liberating army of only 60,000 troops, had compromised with his campaign commander Tommy Franks on numbers. The total force deployed in the region would eventually amount to 250,000. But that was still half the number of troops that Norman Schwarzkopf and Colin Powell used to oust Saddam from Kuwait. This was clearly a Rumsfeld plan for a new kind of war, based on air power, computer technology and small, agile ground forces.

"It was detailed stuff, and there was not a word of dissent from anyone in that room," said Daniel Goure, a Pentagon adviser who attended the meeting. "Not from General McCaffrey, not from anyone. And remember the whole armchair-general crowd was there. Peter Pace said very deliberately: 'We are ready to go today', despite the failure to get the fourth infantry division basing rights in Turkey. No one said: 'Are you sure you've got enough troops Peter?' Everyone was on board with the plan."

There is dissent now, as well as bitter recrimination within the Bush administration. "After just over one week of war," said Mr Goure, "people have suddenly gone into panic. This isn't a traditional war. And without the traditional fall-back and comfort of a vast army, as in the first Gulf War, nerves have frayed."

The week's brutal images of dead and captured American marines, the constant ambush of American supply vehicles and the dread prospect of a prolonged "Vietcong" type of resistance, has rattled Washington. The ferocity of guerrilla-style attacks on stretched coalition supply-lines has taken the Pentagon's war planners by surprise as much as American and British forces.

The third infantry division, fifty miles from Baghdad, is low on food and water. In southern cities such as Basra and Nasiriyah, irregular troops are digging in and terrorising civilians, instead of fleeing invading troops as expected. Intense bombing in Baghdad has failed to lead to defections among senior Republican commanders. The talk of "shock and awe" which dominated the first days of the conflict has been replaced by an old military favourite: "In any plan, the enemy has a vote."

On Friday, Lieutenant-General William Wallace, the army's senior ground commander in Iraq, said that a longer war than had been anticipated was now likely. He added: "The enemy we're fighting is different from the one we war-gamed against."

Whose fault was that? In Washington, the blame game has already begun.

"We're still talking about minor setbacks here so far, but you are already seeing players trying to cover themselves and make sure the finger isn't pointed at them," said a former National Security Adviser with close links to the White House. "Not everybody wants to be seen too close to Don Rumsfeld right now."

Gen McCaffrey kept his counsel on March 13. But last week he said he believed the United States had gone to war with "inadequate forces", as a result of Mr Rumsfeld's determination to launch a new form of rapid warfare with a smaller force. When the Iraqis failed to capitulate in short order, there were insufficient forces to implement a "Plan B".

Another retired general told The Telegraph: "Our force package is very light. If things don't happen in the way you thought they would, you get into a tangle, a mismatch of your strategy and your force."

Even within the Pentagon, criticism of the civilian "suits" is increasingly common from military personnel. After lying low after the diplomatic fiasco at the United Nations, the Secretary of State, General Colin Powell, is back in fashion. Nostalgia for the Powell doctrine; cautious, conservative and based on the use of "overwhelming force", as in 1991, is rife. "We are seeing the ground war that was not supposed to happen in Rumsfeld's plan," said one state department official. "Now we have three divisions strung out over 300 miles and the follow-on 4th division, our reserve, is probably three weeks away from landing."

The CIA has spent the week telling anyone willing to listen that such a mess would never have come about, had the Pentagon taken agency briefings seriously.

"We gave the Pentagon a report a month ago," said a CIA official. "It stated that there was a danger that coalition forces could be attacked from the rear as they advanced.

"It warned that paramilitaries could threaten and exploit the civilian population as shields. It predicted that irregular and unorthodox tactics could be used by Saddam's fedayeen. It said they might fight wearing civilian clothes. It was ignored."

Intelligence officials have also complained that warnings of possible resistance were frequently "sanitised" by hawks, including the agency's own director, George Tenet, before reaching the White House and President Bush. "The caveats would be dropped and the edges filed off," said one.

Judith Yaphe, the chief CIA analyst on Iraq during the first Gulf War, said that Mr Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, consistently preferred to rely on the optimism of Iraqi opposition groups in exile, and Israeli intelligence.

"It was a fantasy," she said. "They had a strategic vision that we would face no opposition, that everyone would surrender, that Iraqis would throw rose petals and rice. Clearly those judgments were not based on reality."

For their part, Mr Rumsfeld's supporters have begun to talk darkly of incompetence at the heart of the White House, secret agendas in the ranks of the US military and paranoia at the CIA.

"At the White House you have Zalmay Khalizad in charge of relations with the free Iraqis, and he's also been dealing with the Turks," said one Pentagon hawk. "Zal's a good guy, but he's far from being efficient in that role and that hasn't helped planning."

On the CIA's criticisms, the official was dismissive. "Ever since 9/11 the intelligence services have been ultra-careful to cover their backs. The warnings may have been there somewhere in the small print of a report. But they were never made a dominant theme."

According to Mr Goure, the Pentagon military has problems with Mr Rumsfeld because it has refused to accept that in an era of vastly-improved technology, it may be possible to downsize.

"The military want to do this the medieval way, taking towns, taking territory, using overwhelming firepower," he said. "That's because they're as concerned with the future of the army after this war as they are with the kind of force needed now.

"If Franks pulls it off with the force and plan he's got, without reinforcements, it would mean that Rumsfeld could say: 'Why do we need all these divisions and all this firepower?' That's the hidden motive in this debate for the military, and the retired generals are well aware of it too. The truth is we're doing well and the outcome is still certain victory. It might take longer but it won't take very long."

As President Bush headed to Camp David for another weekend away from an increasingly tense capital, there was a general attempt to play down the arguments of the first week and the prospect of a war that most Americans now believe could last up to six months.

Mr Rumsfeld talked despairingly of "mood swings from highs to lows and back again in the space of 24 hours". Ari Fleischer, President Bush's spokesman, mused aloud: "On June 13th 1944, would someone have said 'You have one week after D-Day to do the job'?"

A senior administration official sympathetic to Mr Rumsfeld said that the week's buck-passing and sniping had been deeply unfair on the Secretary of Defence.

"It's been little more than a week since we started this. Rumsfeld and the Pentagon were handed quite a task. They were told that it would be best to take Iraq quickly, before the searing heat began. They were told that civilian lives must be protected at all costs as well as the country's infrastructure. So they planned to go to Baghdad as quickly as possible to take Saddam out.

"In a sense the US is fighting with one hand tied behind its back in a special kind of war which needs special tactics. More divisions would be nice. But they wouldn't solve that problem."

Mr Rumsfeld is a notoriously impatient man. But on Friday afternoon he was reduced to appealing for a little patience from his critics. "It's a little early for history to be written," he said.